A Handbook of Qualitative Methodologies for Mass Communication Research

Nicholas W. Jankowski, Klaus Bruhn Jensen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134938247
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Over the last decade there has been a growing use of qualitative research methods in the study of social and cultural change. Incorporating theoretical insights from discourse analysis, ethnograohy and reception theory such research has proven a fruitful and enlightening mode of analysis.The Handbook represents the first volume devoted to the utilization of such methods in mass media research. It includes contributions from those at the forefront o communication studies who apply a developing methodology to media contents, contexts and audiences. Among others, Gaye Tuchman writes on news production, Dave Morley and Roger Silverstone on media audiences, and Horace Newcombe applies qualitative methods to television drama.In view of the rapid changes which the media environment is now undergoing, the books systematic overview of qualitative research methods will benefit commercial organisations as well as academic institutions.

Part I
History

The first part of the Handbook lays out some main lines of the “history” of qualitative approaches—their origins in various scientific disciplines and analytical traditions. Whereas qualitative methodologies are sometimes perceived as recent innovations and additions to the toolbox of mass communication research, Chapters 1 and 2 document the long history of qualitative modes of inquiry in both of the main traditions which inform contemporary communication studies.

The humanities, as examined in Chapter 1, represent centuries of textual and interpretive scholarship. While a mainstream of this research originally tended to emphasize the contemplative understanding and appreciation of particularly literary masterpieces and other high-cultural forms, recent work has included popular culture and everyday practices in the area of inquiry, studying the social and cultural uses of texts, images, and other signs. Culture, following Raymond Williams, increasingly has come to be defined as a whole way of life. One important contribution of the humanities to the study of mass communication has been the development of theory and of a theoretical reflexivity which may enable the field to conceive of forms of communication and culture that go beyond the familiar institutions and practices of industrial capitalism and modernity as focused on by the social sciences. A further, methodological contribution of the humanities tradition comes from its development of systematic approaches to the study of language and discourse, which constitute the primary categories and media of qualitative research.

Chapter 2 shows that qualitative modes of inquiry also had a prominent status in early social-scientific research. During the first decades following World War II, when the mainstream of the social sciences turned quantitative, qualitative research remained an undercurrent, which re-emerged and gained new momentum from the 1960s. This development had several heterogeneous origins across the social sciences. Theoretical frameworks and methods were derived from symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, and ethnography as practiced in anthropology and sociology. Like the humanities, these approaches emphasized the importance of everyday language and consciousness in orienting social action. Further, some studies were informed by a critical knowledge-interest as in, for instance, action research giving priority to the social applications of new knowledge. One key contribution of qualitative social science to mass communication research has been its explicit and detailed articulation of methodology, specifying the research process as a sequence of procedural steps which makes possible intersubjective agreement— and disagreement—on findings.

The two chapters on history suggest at least two areas of convergence—one theoretical, the other methodological. Theoretical convergence is manifest around a notion of language as action. Both the humanistic and social-scientific traditions of qualitative research emphasize that the conceptual categories of everyday language lend orientation to most forms of social action and interaction—what represents, in the aggregate, the social construction of reality. Language is a means of meaningful action, as suggested by speechact theory (Chapter 1), as well as a mediator of various types of interaction from daily conversation to political and cultural activity. The social semiotics outlined in Chapter 1 offers a theoretical framework for further specifying the relationship between mass media, everyday language, and social action.

Methodological convergence, further, is occurring in the development of systematic approaches to the analysis of qualitative data. Whereas Chapter 2 situates the analysis of data within the research process as a whole, Chapter 1 presents discourse analysis as a specific method for strengthening what remain weak links of the qualitative research process: analysis, interpretation, and documentation. Later chapters also contain analysis and discussion of mass communication as a discursive practice (see especially Chapters 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, and 12).

All chapters include a large number of references to previous research, including basic textbooks that may complement this Handbook. Further, the Handbook may work well in combination with collections of materials which address particular media in their cultural context. As general reference works which cover aspects of the history of qualitative research on mass media, we add here Keywords (Williams, 1983b), the Handbook of Communication Science (Berger and Chaffee, 1987) which is also discussed in “Introduction: the qualitative turn,” and the International Encyclopedia of Communications (Barnouw et al., 1989).

Chapter 1
Humanistic scholarship as qualitative science: contributions to mass communication research

Klaus Bruhn Jensen

INTRODUCTION

For more than 2,500 years, the humanities have been studying, in the contemporary terminology, the texts of interpersonal and mass communication. Traditionally, however, humanistic studies of literary works and other major cultural forms have not emphasized the analysis of culture as communicative practices. Studies, instead, have been said to perform an exegesis, or reading, of cultural tradition, poetic genius, the Zeitgeist, or an ideology which found its expression in texts. The changes in concepts and terminology are significant, because, as Raymond Williams has shown, the “keywords” of a culture at different historical times imply particular conceptions both of social reality and of the purpose of scholarship about this reality (Williams, 1983b). Whereas scholars differ on the precise origins of the humanities, it may be argued that a distinctively humanistic tradition, drawing on centuries of historical and textual scholarship, began to emerge in the early nineteenth century, and that, further, the humanities assumed their current shape when “social science” was spawned as a separate area of inquiry around the beginning of this century. If the origin of the concept of communication is associated with modernity and the rise of Lockean individualism (Peters, 1989), it is only within the last century that communication and information have become keywords across the humanities and social sciences. In the humanities in particular, the qualitative turn has been a communicative turn. This past century, then, may be thought of as the century of the sign, spanning the rise of mass communication on an unprecedented scale as well as, partly as a response to this (for want of a better term) megatrend (Naisbitt, 1982), the rise of semiotics and other communication theory to explicate an opaque social reality requiring interpretation.

The present chapter traces some main lines of this complex social and scientific development from the perspective of humanistic scholarship. After introducing a common definition of communication as the social production of meaning, I present a survey of major analytical traditions, with special reference to historical studies of literacy, semiotics, and contemporary cultural studies. The chapter further considers a number of current challenges from postmodernist and feminist theories of language. A section on methodology notes a gradual shift from textual, aesthetic appreciation to the systematic analysis of specific cultural forms, particularly with the development of discourse analysis. Perhaps the key contribution of the humanities to qualitative research is an emphatic commitment to studying the language of particular texts and genres in their historical setting. The dark side of this literate bias is a certain blindness to non-alphabetic modes of communication, not least today’s visual forms of communication, which are addressed in a separate section. In conclusion, I discuss the outline of a social semiotics which, while drawing on the categories of humanistic theory and discourse analysis, would approach mass communication as a cultural practice, in which issues of power, identity, and social structure are negotiated.

Communication as meaning production

To say that the mass media produce and circulate meanings in society is a more controversial statement than it may seem. Different disciplines and theoretical schools tend to define and apply the concept of meaning-its origination, interpretation, and impact-in distinctive ways. Not only must one distinguish, from a social-scientific perspective, between the definition of meaning production as a social ritual and as a transmission of contents from producers to audiences (Carey, 1989: 15). From a humanistic perspective, the contents must be conceptualized as the expression of a particular subjectivity and aesthetics, and as the representation of a particular context. These several aspects of meaning production may be specified with reference to three basic constituents of the communicative process which are shared by most contemporary humanistic as well as social-scientific models of communication: the message of communication, the communicators, and the embedding social structure; or—in a humanistic terminology—discourse, subjectivity, and context.

The concept of discourse, first, is a legacy of the textual scholarship that has been characteristic of most Western philosophy, theology, and other humanistic research. The underlying assumption is that language is the primary medium of interchange between humans and reality (in processes of perception, cognition, and action), and that, accordingly, verbal texts may become vehicles of knowledge and truth. Whereas traditionally this assumption applied to religious, scholarly, and literary texts, today much qualitative work employs the concept of discourse to refer to any use of language, or other semiotic systems, in social context. Crucially, discourse now is said to include everyday interaction and its categories of consciousness, thus constituting the medium of the social construction of reality (Berger and Luckmann, 1966). Through language, reality becomes social. Equally, it is through language that reality becomes intersubjective and accessible for analysis. Hence, for the purpose of qualitative research language and other semiotic systems represent both an analytical object and a central tool of analysis.

Subjectivity, similarly, has come to be defined in terms of language. In contrast to a philosophy of consciousness conceiving of subjects as relatively autonomous agents that exercise moral and aesthetic judgment, recent theories of language and subjectivity have described the subject as a position in language (for a survey, see Coward and Ellis, 1977). Such a position, while negotiable, tends to imply a particular perspective on the world and on one’s own identity and place in the world. In Althusser’s (1971) terms, the subject is interpellated or hailed to occupy particular positions. The mass media, of course, are among the main sources of interpellation in the modern period. Moreover, the positioning of subjects in language implies their excommunication from certain other positions—the unconscious. According to Lacan’s (1977) reformulation of Freud, it is this process of positioning which serves to structure also the unconscious as a language. In terms of the present argument, mass communication can be said to give voice to some discursive positions while silencing others.

Finally, humanistic communication theory has approached the social structure in which mass communication is embedded as literally a con-text—a configuration of texts that must be “read” or interpreted, and which is the outcome of a process of historical change. This approach is in keeping with the traditional understanding of history as being, at one level, a set of stories about the past. Changing the analytical focus from specific stories as told by particular bards, to the deep structure or system of stories which dominates a given society or culture (Foucault, 1972), contemporary studies have suggested how media and other agents of socialization serve to inscribe individuals in the culture. Such stories lend a sense of purpose to the social practices in which individuals and institutions engage, pervading everyday consciousness and action.

Discourse, in sum, is the common object of humanistic inquiry. Yet, the conception of discourse has varied both in different historical periods and between humanistic disciplines. Furthermore, one conspicuous absence in much work has been the lack of an explicit examination of the impact of discourse with reference to particular subjects in their specific social context. The following section offers a survey of some main tenets of previous humanistic research; the survey further considers the extent to which each research tradition has examined culture as a set of communicative practices. Whereas a chapter of this nature cannot give more than a reductive sketch of what is an ancient and heterogeneous field, special attention is given to contributions from literary criticism and cultural studies, with some reference to history and psychology. The humanities, from the beginning, have been an interdisciplinary field.

HUMANISTIC TRADITIONS

From literacy to literary criticism

Whereas, in oral cultures, bardic poetry traditionally serves as the memory of the culture and its vehicle of education, Greek culture particularly from the fifth century BC came to depend, in part, on alphabetic writing for these purposes (see the survey in Thomas, 1989). Plato’s attack on the poets may be taken as indicative of a gradual transition to literate culture (Havelock, 1963): poets should no longer be trusted in social matters such as politics or the writing of history, even if their poetry could still be appreciated as personal opinion or myth. In sciences, alphabetic writing may ensure a systematic and cumulative analysis. In politics, the manageable set of distinct letters makes possible a social and governmental system of significant complexity by offering a resource for organization and debate across time and space.

It is likely that the alphabet contributed to a reconception of knowledge not as memory, but as a record of verifiable statements. Reality, in the form of the alphabet, was now manifestly there as an exteriorized representation which could be studied, worked upon, and transformed. A system of writing thus represents a cultural resource with important social consequences, facilitating the distinction between past and present and, importantly, a perception of inconsistencies within received history, which may prepare conditions of conflict and change (Goody and Watt, 1963; Goody, 1987). Though much recent media theory has overstated the determination of culture by new technologies of communication (McLuhan, 1962; 1964; Postman, 1985), literacy did imply new practices of constructing social reality (Berger and Luckmann, 1966; see also Innis, 1972; Ong, 1982).

The uses of literacy in the West have been studied with reference to changing historical and social circumstances. Being a relatively affluent society with a substantial number of literate people, classical Greece enjoyed the material conditions for developing the technology of writing into forms which may, in part, account for the breakthrough of arts and sciences in that period. Building on their own experience, practitioner-theoreticians of rhetoric and poetics in the Graeco-Roman tradition accumulated a fund of systematic knowledge about the characteristics and effects of verbal messages (oral and written, fictional and factual), which was codified in classic writings by, for example, Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian. This knowledge, as taught in schools and academies, lived on through the Middle Ages, being revitalized and reformulated in the Renaissance and afterwards (Arnold and Frandsen, 1984).

It is important to note at this point that the social consequences of communication technologies always depend on their embedding in shifting historical institutions. As shown by Eisenstein (1979), it was the scribal culture of elites in medieval monasteries, as captured by Eco (1981), rather than an oral and popular culture, which was transformed by the printing press beginning in the fifteenth century. By ending the monopoly of Church institutions on the definition of knowledge, print technology became a major factor contributing to the cultural shifts of Renaissance and Reformation.

It may be added that, throughout “Western civilization,” the question of how words are used to act in, and enact, a particular reality has been premised on a religious notion of the Word, which is integral to the Christian metaphysics that continues to suffuse the humanities. Words are the source of religious revelation, aesthetic experience, and scientific truth. Furthermore, the centrality ascribed to words in both religious and profane matters is rooted in the Greek logos tradition which assumes “the transcendental intimacy of thought, words, and reality” (Heim, 1987: 42). Rules of interpretation, accordingly, have been subject to continuous controversy, shaping social life and cultural practices generally. The interpretation of the Bible and other canonical texts, of course, has resulted in conflicts that could make or break individuals as well as whole societies. The sense of being present in the world through the word is, indeed, a notion which can be seen to underlie much humanistic theory. Recent work (Derrida, 1967) has challenged such a “logocentric” notion of discourse, which implies that the mental content represents an autonomous, metaphysical level of reality. What the critique still does not specify, however, is how the content of signs relates to the material and social aspects of discourse; this question will be addressed below in the outline of social semiotics.

Literacy has been a precondition for the development of modern forms of social organization and consciousness, in private as well as public life, during industrial capitalism (Lowe, 1982). Historical and literary research has noted that genres, in particular, bear witness to the changing social uses of communication. Thus, for example, the novel form, the news genre, and the encyclopedia, in different ways, contributed to constructing the modern social order. The novel, for one, while depending on the rise of the middle class as literary entrepreneurs, also owed its success to the development of a new realm of privacy and leisure in which that same social group became readers in search of narratives that could suggest appropriate standards of private conduct, as well as filling a new social space and time with entertainment (Watt, 1957). Equally, the discourses of news in the early press implied a redefinition of individuals, their economic rights, and their participation in political life, hence suggesting standards of public conduct with other citizens (Habermas, 1989; Schudson, 1978). The encyclopedia, finally, served to publish the contemporary rang...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Tables
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: the qualitative turn
• Part I History
• Part II Systematics
• Part III Pragmatics
• References
• Index of names
• Index of subjects